The Australian Bureau of Statistics, CSIRO and the Statistical Society of Australia, Inc. (SSAI) are sponsoring two one-day short courses to be presented by Donald B. Rubin, Professor of Statistics at Harvard University.

Professor Rubin is one of the best known and most widely cited statisticians of the past forty years, with more than 350 articles published in more than thirty journals. He is also the author or co-author of several books which remain seminal works in their field. Prof. Rubin has lectured extensively throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Prof. Rubin will be visiting the ABS and CSIRO in Canberra during the week of 10–14 January 2011 and CSIRO in Sydney during the week of 17–21 January 2011.

In Canberra, Prof. Rubin will present two one-day short courses at the ABS:

A short course on Causal Inference in Observational Studies on Wednesday 12 January, and

A short course on Imputation for Missing Data in Official Statistics on Thursday 13 January.

Ms Elizabeth Zell will co-present both courses with Prof. Rubin. Ms Zell is a distinguished mathematical statistician working for the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta. Her current areas of research are missing data, including multiple imputation and a proper imputation evaluation; propensity score methods for causal inference and for believable conditional association; and vaccine preventable bacterial diseases.